As someone who does both creative and critical work, my poetry and literary criticism often cross each other in strange ways. That’s the story of these poems, as many of them draw on the research I’ve been doing lately on fascination, and all of them speak back to the literary canon in some way. The showers in “fascinations: cityscape,” for example, recall John Rechy’s City of Night, and “fascinations: molly” places the experience of doing MDMA in conversation with Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Ulysses. Blending the poetic with the theoretic, these poems attempt to blur the boundaries between the present and the literary past, between criticism and poetic creation.

Author Bio

Patrick Kindig is a dual MFA/PhD candidate at Indiana University, where he studies American literature and writes poetry. He is the author of the micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press 2016), and his poems have recently appeared in the Adroit Journal, Willow Springs, CutBank, Thrush, Bombay Gin, and other journals.